Blog: Missoula Notebook

Little Girl Dead: Going to a Gun Show with Dwayne Smail on My Mind

By Sutton Stokes, 3-09-08

	SIG Sauer P220 45 ACP with hollow-point rounds. Photo by kcdsTM.

Saturday’s paper finally had some details about what happened at the Montana Village Apartments in Evergreen on Wednesday night, when Dwayne Smail says he left his loaded pistol on the bed beside him while he and his girlfriend’s 18-month-old daughter dropped off to sleep. Smail later told police that he woke to find the girl holding the gun, and that it was when he tried to grab it away from her that it fired. 

The girl’s mother, who was away from home on Wednesday evening, was quoted as saying that Smail was in the habit of handling the gun around the house. On the local television news last night, the well-coiffed young anchorwoman seemed to be struggling with her emotions as she related that the girl had been known to pick the gun up in the past, and that the mother had repeatedly asked Smail to lock it away.

Smail’s charge is negligent homicide.

After reading this, I folded up the paper, cleared the breakfast dishes, and drove south under overcast skies to Hamilton for the Ravalli County Gun Show. The symmetry was coincidental, as I’d been planning to attend this event for several weeks, but of course the fates of Smail and the little girl referred to as “K.W.” were on my mind as I drove. “Senseless” seems like a good word for the situation, but it’s only a start. “Grotesque” comes to mind next.

This was my first time at a gun show, and I didn’t know what to expect, exactly. I knew that gun shows are something of a flash point in our ongoing national debate about guns. The opportunity to sell guns to each other is important to a lot of gun owners, and gun shows are widely considered to be next on the chopping block when it comes to gun-control policy. If, for example, the federal government were to impose a nationwide three-day waiting period (which it’s not entirely clear the federal government would have authority to do, but still), gun shows would effectively cease to exist, since only sales initiated on Friday morning could be concluded before the weekend were over.

Meanwhile, to the “other side,” the people the gun enthusiasts refer to as “antis” (as in “anti-gun,” or maybe even “anti-freedom,” and of course, as the t-shirts for sale at the gun show advised, “freedom isn’t free”), gun shows are murky and ominous-sounding affairs where, it is assumed, people who somehow couldn’t buy guns otherwise are able to obtain them, not to mention the fact that the events gather concentrations of people who are really into guns, an enthusiasm that is frankly hard for many outsiders to understand.

It’s not hard for me to understand, at least on some levels. I shot for the first time in Coast Guard boot camp and carried a sidearm regularly (and long arms less regularly) when I operated as a boarding officer in the Florida Straits. I found I was passably good at target shooting, which was a thrill for a city kid who hadn’t grown up around guns, but that wasn’t the only attraction. Certain other powerful emotions took hold of me during those early experiences, emotions related to the high-stakes feeling of responsibility and the focused concentration necessary for safe gun handling, as well as the aesthetic pleasure of using one of the last categories of well-made things. Short of fancy sports cars, after all, one is not likely — in our increasingly disposable world — to become intimate with very many other mechanical devices that are machined and assembled and tuned to such precise and narrow specifications. .

So it’s not so hard for me to understand the enthusiasm some people feel for guns. There are some other things in the gun world it is harder for me to understand, however.

I wedged my Toyota Corolla in between two towering SUVs and picked my way through the wet mud of the fairground parking lot to the exhibition hall. Just inside the door was a display of bumper stickers for sale: “Bush is Right”; “Liberalism is a Mental Disease, Call Dr. Rush”; etc. I paid my three dollars to a man dressed as a Western sheriff, complete with badge and a long-barreled revolver in a holster.

The vendors were ranged along tables in about ten rows, stretching away for about a hundred feet toward the back of the hall. In the back, a display of huge metal gun safes marked the edge of the vendors’ area. At 10:30 in the morning, the show was already well-attended. The crowd was overwhelmingly male and tended toward middle age and girth, lots of plaid and fleece stretched over lots of ponderous bellies and wide backs, which made it hard to squeeze through the narrow aisles.

The wares on display varied widely, though in general there was a do-it-yourself garage-sale vibe, assuming you go to the kind of garage sales that sell a jumble of guns and rifles and holsters and memorabilia. Some dealers offered antiques and older used guns, including what one label described as a “Wells Fargo Coach Gun” from the 1800s in 8 gauge (if you don’t know shotguns, that’s huge). There were displays of hunting rifles, newer handguns still in their factory boxes, and lots of gun parts and brass shell casings (for economy-minded people who “reload,” or recycle the casings to construct new usable rounds on their own). The novelty stuff was relatively limited: one table offered military-style weapons, including an Uzi, and there was a massive and high-tech-looking rifle being raffled off at another. But for the most part, the room had the look and feel and smell of a cluttered garage turned inside out, and a lot of the vendors looked like kindly old grandfathers.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, since we are in that part of the country, I only noticed two Nazi-related items, daggers with swastikas on the hilt.

I felt out of place and awkward, and I left after about forty-five minutes.

So what do we do about all the guns, and about incidents like the one Smail seems to have caused on Wednesday night? I’m at something of a loss, or I guess I should say that there doesn’t seem to be a — I’m trying to think of something other to say than “magic bullet,” but I can’t.

I heard on the radio the other day — coincidentally as I was driving along Miller Creek Road, looking for the Forest Service road where a friend of mine goes to sight in his hunting rifles — that Americans buy about a million guns every year. That means the odds are good that, today, someone like Smail is buying the gun with which he will at some point down the line forever change not only his life but the lives of those who love him, and perhaps the lives of some other set of people who love someone else.

The question is whether we have any good way to prevent gun sales to the stupid at the policy level, as opposed to, say, harshly punishing the Smails of the world. If gun sales were to become illegal tomorrow, there would of course quickly be even more of a flourishing illegal market in the things than there is right now (and it’s already pretty flourishing). I’d refer you to, say, the market in illegal drugs, and point out that a lot of people who would like to see a prohibition on gun sales might be open, on the other hand, to a decriminalization of some forms of currently illegal drugs. Of course there are huge distinctions to be made (pot never killed anyone, but handguns — not so much), and I’m not saying that holding the two views makes anyone a hypocrite, but I do think it would be foolish to ignore the apparently powerful desire of vast numbers of people in this country to own guns, and to fail to consider the evidence from the “drug war” that a lot of people are quite willing to disobey laws they consider unjust.

And of course there is that pesky Second Amendment to the Constitution, which I’m afraid I don’t see a way to read in a way that would permit the infringement of the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and I say that not only as a confirmed political liberal but as a professional editor. We can argue about the “well-regulated militia” part, I suppose, but, if your objections to a “personal right” reading of this amendment rest on comma placement, I hope you realize that this boils down to essentially not having an argument to make.

One place where I don’t connect well with gun culture has to do with the self-satisfied, black-and-white manner in which some gun enthusiasts view the world. My thoughts on this crystallized recently when I was reading some on-line gun—discussion forums, and I started noticing how many members have in their “signatures” and/or enjoy flinging around in discussions some variation on the Edmund Burke quote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

I can’t argue with the quote, which is something of a truism, but has it occurred to the guys who paste it into their signature blocks how pleased with themselves it makes them look? What makes me a little squirmy is the implicit claim that the quoter knows for sure he’s one of the “good men,” and further that the nature of both the evil he is combating and the good he is standing for is obvious and self-evident. Personally, I’ve always been less afraid of uncertainty than of people who are sure they have the answers, “conviction” being a characteristic shared pretty universally by the worst people in history.

I suppose that, on the concealed-carry forums, “evil men” might refer to criminal wrongdoers, with the quote being used to express a desire to be prepared to step in and and protect others in situations of acute physical danger — a desire, I’ll confess, that stirs within me. But on the forums devoted to more general gun-related discussions, the implication seems to be more along the lines that the “evil” people are trying to take all the guns away, and that “good” people need to resist. (Or am I missing something here? As always, comments are appreciated.)

Admittedly, we have reached such a dysfunctional point in our political discourse in general that many people think it acceptable to apply terms like “evil” to our fellow citizens (see also the “Liberalism is a mental disease…” bumper sticker mentioned earlier), but I think both sides of the gun debate would do well to take a deep breath and consider their opponents’ nobler impulses. The “antis” are taking steps that they believe will begin to reduce the level of gun violence in America, and the — what? “pros”? — believe that continued, robust access to guns is the only way for citizens to protect themselves in a world that, whether we like it or not or wish it otherwise, is awash in a sea of the things. And I find that I can’t point to entirely fatal flaws in either argument.

Assuming that the facts of the case are as they were presented in Saturday’s paper, though, I hope that people on all sides of this issue can agree on the need to jail someone like Smail for a long, long time.

P.S. Anyone interested in a Missoula chapter of this? Let me know.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.